{"id":5839,"date":"2011-08-23T14:30:20","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T14:30:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/08\/23\/do-you-really-need-a-graph-for\/"},"modified":"2011-08-23T14:30:20","modified_gmt":"2011-08-23T14:30:20","slug":"do-you-really-need-a-graph-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/08\/23\/do-you-really-need-a-graph-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Do You Really Need a Graph for That?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As long as I’m picking on education research papers in Science<\/cite>, I might as well call out the one immediately after the paper I wrote up in the previous post. This one, titled Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills<\/a>, is another paper whose basic premise I generally agree with– they found that graduate students who had teaching responsibilities as well as research responsibilities did a better job of writing research proposals than graduate students who only did research. From all appearances, it’s a good study, and makes a valuable point.<\/p>\n

And yet, I have a hard time not mocking a paper that includes the following data graph:<\/p>\n

\"i-1a0b5fb4f01c23c6b5034e04af9d72c2-teaching_research_silly_graph.png\"<\/p>\n

I mean, really? You have two data points with error bars. does this really need to be presented as a graph? Let alone one playing “How to Lie With Statistics” games with the axis limits?<\/p>\n

Wouldn’t a table be just as effective? In the space taken up by the two basically identical graphs of this form, you could’ve put a single table with all<\/em> of your data, not just data on two selected subcategories of your evaluation. You could even have included a table with a detailed statistical breakdown in a convenient easy-to-read format, rather than scattering the results through the text.<\/p>\n

But, I guess it isn’t Science<\/cite>-worthy if it doesn’t have a graph. Even an incredibly silly one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As long as I’m picking on education research papers in Science, I might as well call out the one immediately after the paper I wrote up in the previous post. This one, titled Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills, is another paper whose basic premise I generally agree with– they found that… Continue reading Do You Really Need a Graph for That?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[144,13,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data_presentation","category-education","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}